Poll: Do You Like Keybord Font.

[monkeyo2]

I'd prefer separate . and , keys as I'll probably use the keyboard much more for typing words than code or formulas. I'd also prefer a sans-serif font (but not Eras, I haaaaaate it! or Courier as it reminds me of postscript errors), but the one on the render does look retro, so I can see from ED's sig why he might choose it!

Ultimately I don't really care that much as I'll just get used to what we get, and I'd imagine someone will make a customizable on-screen keyboard to fill in any gaps.

 

[Chip]

Six more pages worth of keypad argument? Really?

There is nothing that can be said about the layout that hasn't been said already (probably 3 or 4 times) in one of these threads. Craig and ED are well aware of all the options and concerns. Starting up this argument again is beyond pointless.

 

[MWeston]

Okay, I finally made it to the end of this topic. Here's my summary of the situation to get everyone on the same page and maybe help with the squabbling.

- ED's render has errors in the layout. That's very obvious but it's a work in progress and I think he posted it to get the external discussion going again.
- There have been a lot of back and forth email discussions between the main group members designing the keypad for a while now and other than these errors that I don't recall being there a few days ago (double parenthesis for example), the consensus was to keep the layout more towards the simple side without a rediculous amount of clutter, but each distributor in their country wanted to support the more common characters of their respective customers. This layout is the work in progress to that end.
- Obviously the extra keys were decided to please these 'popular' countries as the compromise to satisfy as many as possible with the keypad that launches with the product. The idea of making new keymats available has always been on the table but since we have to take this one step at a time, we need ONE layout to sell inside the Pandora.
- I've pushed to make sure all the normal stuff I see on my keyboard is there (like the ones on all the number keys). If they aren't there now, they were before so I'll have to see what happened. The idea is not to lose basic functionality at all just to add more special characters.
- The font we want to select should be simple and free to use. No licensing headaches please.
- The characters are written on the rubber and sealed in a plastic coating so they cannot be changed later. A new print on the keys would be required for each layout change. My speculation is that making different versions wouldn't really add much cost to the ordering process as long as we still needed hundreds of each type. This is my speculation and I still haven't heard anything more about it but it's just a new file in the printer. How hard can that be?
- I also haven't heard anything more about glow in the dark keys, but of course that is only a consideration because the characters are sealed and there's no way to touch that material so that might be the only reason why it was brought up in the first place. I have mixed feelings on it. It means I would have to close the lid for sure if it was in the bedroom while I slept and I think I would prefer it to be a dim glow any other time.
- Personally, I don't really care what the font is as long as it is easy to read, a respectable size on each button and doesn't have "bubble gum" or "happy color rainbow time" in the font name
- We probably have another two weeks minimum (maybe three) before the manufacturer will even need to see the final layout so a discussion like this is good and worth continuing but please understand the goals listed above.

Starting up this argument again is beyond pointless.

I don't think it's so bad as long as people understand what our goals are which is not to get too cluttered because there's just no way to please everyone everywhere with one keyboard. If you google keyboard layouts for wiki pages, there are just so many!

P.S. I do think the most benefit from this topic is finding a nice looking, free font for the keys rather than trying to change what goes on the keys. Two alt keys? seriously? come on now!

 

[cosurgi]

I already asked privately, but still didn't get a clear answer. Can I pay extra, by bank transfer, to get a different keyboard layout (let's ignore how expensive it might be)? Let's say that you would give people an option to choose one another layout, or maybe even from two another layouts. Like this one, and that one. After all those are the winning layouts after careful community's design process.

Did you get an answer on this ? I am interested as well, as my design is not been even considered so far (as I arrived a bit late in the game) so a new vote on your designs doesn't really interest me and will probably produce similar end results..
Not, either.

This matter is quite urgent: devs don't have a design (ED's design has errors - this proves it), so even without his approval to make the poll official, I'll make an unofficial poll, somewhere about tomorrow. So they will see and perhaps reconsider. But still I hope that he answers my PMs and agrees to make it an official poll.

I was thinking that in the second question I'll ask if people wanted to pay extra (how much) to have a custom layout printed. If there will be more people who want this, maybe they will officially agree on that.

EDIT: wow - answers from MWeston and Chip! I have to read them. We posted simultaneously, so in this post I was unaware of their replies. I want to make that clear. My reply to MWeston's points is below

 

[Bronek]

I've put EvilDragon's design under careful scrutiny, and there are errors!. You can't seriously sell us Pandora with a keyboard layout that has errors, don't you? The ^ * ' | are missing, and ( ) are doubled on F,G and 6,7.

Indeed, it would be foolish to make the keyboard with paragraph symbol but without pipe or star. On the other hand, I like the idea to put / and . on two separate but close keys . I do not so much like location of , and - it would be better to swap them, so that . and , do not share the key. Also, I think the key with (hopefuly it would be shared with .) should also get |. As to ^ and * , perhaps they shopuld be put instead of ( ) on digits 6 and 7 . Finally, even though I do use diacritic characters, I dislike idea of putting them on the keyboard. Instead space should be made for the last missing ' and them some space left free. Or used for "special function" (wireless on/off , suspend etc.) . Example in the attached picture :

I am not very attached to this specific design, but at least it does have all the most useful keys and is not (much) cluttered with those used only in certain locales.

 

[MWeston]

I've put EvilDragon's design under careful scrutiny, and there are errors!. You can't seriously sell us Pandora with a keyboard layout that has errors, don't you? The ^ * ' | are missing, and ( ) are doubled on F,G and 6,7.

I have a flat layout of the keys. It is very interesting that in that shiny render, there really looks like extra ( ) on 6 and 7 but what is actually there is * and |. I still wonder where ^ went. ' is on the key next to Z (or maybe that is the comma). Yeah, I'm not liking this layout right now.

 

[Bronek]

layout is the work in progress to that end.
- Obviously the extra keys were decided to please these 'popular' countries as the compromise to satisfy as many as possible with the keypad that launches with the product.

Big mistake, in my humble opinion - those keys will annoy all the rest of users, who have no use for them, and will never will. Pls somebody explain it to marketing drones. The only special characters which make sense are those for currencies, anything else can be mapped via composite / altgr.

P.S. I do think the most benefit from this topic is finding a nice looking, free font for the keys rather than trying to change what goes on the keys. Two alt keys? seriously? come on now!

I quite like these http://www.bitstream.com/font_rendering/pr...fonts/vera.html -in particular Bitstream Vera Sans Bold Oblique . It's open source.

 

[Phawx]

I don't think they have "marketing drones"

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

 

[pubzombie]

i like a simple font.. like the one used in the first renders or even the one used in these templates. Render pic

Futuristic fonts are cool too.. Mylo2



thank you , can i have some crack now. please

 

[Sphinxter]

That would be disturbing. I thought we already decided on cosurgi's layout a long ass time ago.

I've put EvilDragon's design under careful scrutiny, and there are errors!. You can't seriously sell us Pandora with a keyboard layout that has errors, don't you? The ^ * ' | are missing, and ( ) are doubled on F,G and 6,7.

I have a flat layout of the keys. It is very interesting that in that shiny render, there really looks like extra ( ) on 6 and 7 but what is actually there is * and |. I still wonder where ^ went. ' is on the key next to Z (or maybe that is the comma). Yeah, I'm not liking this layout right now.


That is the comma, single tic ' is 2nd to the leftmost of 'Z', FN+ in blue, caret, '^', is shift 6. What's not to like.

 

[nikkopt]

Behold:

Nah.. really, let's all put our heads together and pick the best choice..

btw:

i like a simple font.. like the one used in the first renders or even the one used in these templates. Render pic

Futuristic fonts are cool too.. Mylo2



thank you , can i have some crack now. please


BUY YOUR OWN CRACK!

 

[urjaman]

For the font, someone came up with Rexlia which i really like and it's license (i downloaded the font .zip, it's inside it) is essentially "free for personal and commercial purposes. No payment is necessary to use Typodermic Freeware Fonts for personal or commercial use."

For what i can see, it's also sans-serif (what many people are wanting here).

And for the keymap, I'm just asking to keep atleast ä and ö there. According to wikipedia, Ä is used in "Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, and Slovak alphabets" (As an _independent letter_ (note below)) and also in the German alphabet as A with an Umlaut. Nearly the same goes for Ö, it's an independent letter in Scandinavia (and other places), O with umlaut in the German alphabet.

And somebody said why would i need äö in a gaming/emulation device? - well for me the most used applications will propably be pidgin (IM), firefox (web,email) and mplayer. I will also play some snes games, but that usage is secondary for me.

Note: I found just a few hours ago when reading this thread, that one can actually make ä by typing ¨ + a, but i've always thought of it as an independent letter (same for ö). Of course i will be able to change the mapping in software, so this isn't really a world crushing issue, just my 0.02€

 

[greendots]

As long as we have to have keys that satisfies 4 languages, this has all the required keys and is most similar to US keyboards.

For custom keyboards would it be possible to have a hard, opaque black plastic rather then clear? It could work out well for laser etching.

 

[cosurgi]

Wow, MWeston I'm so relieved to see your answer here. I was seriously worried.

I have a flat layout of the keys. It is very interesting that in that shiny render, there really looks like extra ( ) on 6 and 7 but what is actually there is * and |. I still wonder where ^ went. ' is on the key next to Z (or maybe that is the comma). Yeah, I'm not liking this layout right now.

In fact I wasn't sure from the rendering if on that key next to Z it is , or '. If it's indeed ' then currently missing are , and ^
(be careful to notice that ` is already present on H key).

- ED's render has errors in the layout. That's very obvious but it's a work in progress and I think he posted it to get the external discussion going again.
I'm very happy to hear this!

- Obviously the extra keys were decided to please these 'popular' countries as the compromise to satisfy as many as possible with the keypad that launches with the product. The idea of making new keymats available has always been on the table but since we have to take this one step at a time, we need ONE layout to sell inside the Pandora.

By satisfying 'popular' countries you are making unhappy from 60% to 85% of people. In poll options a) and g) people clearly voted that they don't want to be "pleased", even though half of them (poll option a) ) USE such a language with special characters! In option h) (25%) they stated that they DON'T NEED, but can accept such letters. That makes 30% + 30% + 25% = 85%. That's a majority, really.

Please note: there are 36% of People who use roman languages with special characters (poll options a) b) c) ). And this is the part from 'popular' countries that you are trying to please... As a result you aggravate 30% from among those 36% who are your target people from 'popular' countries

That's why during our 6-month long discussions we came to conclusion: "if you cannot include all of them, why include any of them?"

- but each distributor in their country wanted to support the more common characters of their respective customers.
You reach this goal by introducing Compose and AltGr. By this way ALL existing special characters are possible to type.

Two alt keys? seriously? come on now!
Well, yeah, I was serious. Some languages use AltGr some others use Compose/Command key (compose is the official ISO name, btw). But honestly it's a lot less important here. Please fell free to remove "AltGr" and put there whatever suits you (what that might be? Then simply people who use AltGr in their country - will use Compose instead. not a big deal. OTOH I seriously designed it like this because it feels most consistent that on the Alt key, you have Fn+Alt=AltGr. How weird it would feel to type e.g. Fn+Alt=ß ? or ¥ or anything else?

EDIT: I will add those links here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key
You can see that Compose and AltGr are both used for different symbol sets. Providing both we will cover ALL possible symbols. This makes everyone happy, including the distributors And the first 'normal' Alt key is used for what it's always used by default: keyboard shortcuts to menu (e.g. Alt-F brings up File menu) and for window managment (e.g. Alt + drag with LMB is moving a window).

- A new print on the keys would be required for each layout change. My speculation is that making different versions wouldn't really add much cost to the ordering process as long as we still needed hundreds of each type. This is my speculation and I still haven't heard anything more about it but it's just a new file in the printer. How hard can that be?

yeah! that's the spirit. If we can have few of them - you will simply please 100% of people if you just take two layouts from last voting. As easy as it could be! Kagato's and mine There are variants though... and I wanted to share with you my last thoughts about that, but that's for later. We still have 2 weeks, right?

- We probably have another two weeks minimum (maybe three) before the manufacturer will even need to see the final layout so a discussion like this is good and worth continuing but please understand the goals listed above.

Great, thanks for your reply!

Starting up this argument again is beyond pointless.
I don't think it's so bad as long as people understand what our goals are which is not to get too cluttered because there's just no way to please everyone everywhere with one keyboard. If you google keyboard layouts for wiki pages, there are just so many!Well, it would be cluttered if you included Cyryllic! But simply printing just two symbols on each key - that's perfectly normal.

Let's just make sure that they are printed in a usable way.

 

[cosurgi]

 

And for everyone who wants to play with keyboard .SVG files in inkscape, you can download: my layout (merged, so you have more flexibility to modify it), Kagato's layout, current ED's layout - work in progress and finally my latest variant.

Yeah, I wanted to share with you my latest variant:

I made two changes here:
1. the top 1...0 row has the same Shift symbols is in normal keyboard, that is: !@#$%^&*()
2. ED has put brightness control on Fn+9 and Fn+0. So do I - on Fn+O and Fn+P, instead of F11 and F12 there.

Those changes are however far less important than the general spirit of the layout, which ED's work-in-progress violates so bad

 

[nikkopt]

I'm Portuguese. Lots of our words use acute accents. The grave accent is also very important in our grammar. Besides that, we only use ~ ^ and ç. They are important, but not as the ´ ` accents.

For ex, the word "cao" is incorrect but when we read it in the proper context, we always read it like "cão", which is the correct one. And anyways, while chatting on the internet, most of us don't use accents at all (to speed up writing) so, unless i'm doing a work for school or writing a letter to my boss, it's no big deal not having most of my "special characters".

 

[cosurgi]

PS: Bronek told me that inkscape is incredibly slow on windows. It works very fast on linux, for me, though. Anybody else uses here windows and inkscape, and could maybe help with that?

EDIT: oops, sorry, I thought that I'm adding this to my previous post.

nikkopt you can write Compose , = ç, and so on with others.

 

[MDave]

Perfect, I say.

People need to be more aware of how much better it is to have a Compose / AltGr key then separate keys for non-english letters.

 

[ljones]

I must admit I'm one of the few(!) people who don't mind the font chosen in the render. Really though (within reason) almost any font will do so long as there aren't copyright or licencing issues. If I had to choose though I'd go with something that looked different rather than (yawn) yet another keyboard with a businessesque serif font on it that is seen on umpteen cheapo windows keyboards. Yuck! Let's go for something different. .

What was the name of that computer-style font from the 70s? Put that on the pandora then we can all pretend we're in "Space: 1999" hehe!

BTW will the pandora have a £ (pound) symbol on the keyboard somewhere?

ljones

 

[cosurgi]

Oh, and here's a full explanation of Compose and AltGr keys!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltGr_key

You won't find a letter impossible to type! Please note also, that Compose and AltGr by default are mapping different symbols, so by providing both Compose and AltGr we are covering ALL possible symbols.

Thanks Spirit for that link!